Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

 

“What would you have us do instead?” Evelyn asked.

“Accept damnation,” Ann said. “It has its power and its charm. And it’s real.”

“So we should all get jobs in gambling casinos.”

“We all do,” Ann said, her voice amused. “What do you think the University of California is? It’s just a minor branch of the Establishment. The only difference is that it has to be subsidized.”

“Are you talking nonsense on purpose?”

“No, I’m serious.”

“You think nothing has any value?”

“No, I think everything has value, absolute value, a child, a house, a day’s work, the sky. But nothing will save us. We were never meant to be saved.”

“What were meant for then?”

“To love the whole damned world,” Ann said, delighted.

“‘In the destructive element immerse,’ Perhaps there’s some truth in it. I might learn. I don’t know. I’m old to learn. And I’m not sure I’d like a world without guilt or goodness. It might seem very empty.”

“Like the desert?”

“Yes,” Evelyn said.

--Jane Rule, The Desert of the Heart

 

It begins when a drunk cop crashes his patrol car into a fire hydrant in Brooklyn in the peak of the summer heat and water pours out over the sidewalk.

And it's Bucky, who's just coming back from his job doing dishes at the Polish bar down the road and Steve is walking with him because he's just finished mopping the floors at the dive restaurant where the potatoes taste like dirt—it's Bucky who whoops with delight and rushes into the spray, tearing off his sweat-stained shirt and pants as he runs. His skivvies turn transparent in a matter of seconds. Arms thrown out to the side like a kid pretending to be an airplane, he laughs in delight, water streaming down his face. Some of the other kids have to rushed to join him at this point, but there's something about the way the cotton clings to Bucky's skin, the way his dick hangs in his wet, graying shorts—

Steve is frozen in the stinking, suffocating heat of a Brooklyn summer, his ears burning.

Bucky shakes out his hair like a wet dog and turns to Steve, droplets trailing down his face, his mouth stretched into a huge grin.

"Steve! Come on!"

And Steve rips off his shirt (and he's aware of how small he is, how his bones jut out under his skivvies, that his torso is still visibly bruised from the last time he got his ass kicked—but it's Bucky and so); he rushes over to join.

 

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah."

 

"So what… what originally brought you here?" Dr. Day smiles a little, her eyes creasing at the corners. She's a very soft sort of woman, all curves and gentle creases. Her hair is black and streaked with gray and it's pulled back in a long braid. She has a collection of blown glass animals lined up along her desk.

Steve is pretty sure she's a former operative of some kind. Her smile is just a bit too controlled and her nails just a little too well-taken care of. But she wasn't assigned by SHIELD. She was recommended.

"Yeah. Um. My—uh—friend, Sam. He told me you were good."

"He’s a good guy. And how do you know Sam?"

"We met, um, exercising."

"And what do you feel prompted you two becoming friends?"

"Shared experience, I guess." He shrugs uncomfortably. The leather armchair is a little too stiff and creaks as he moves. "We're both... Um..."

She smiles encouragingly.

“Veterans,” he finishes. He smiles a little awkwardly because it's been two weeks after their first meeting and he still has no idea how to act. When he is too shallow in his conversation, she treats him with an almost friendly suspicion. When he's too deep, she acts so concerned that he wants to be absolutely anywhere beside her office.

He doesn't want to get deep. He doesn't really know her. He doesn't know if she would understand.

He scratches his elbow absently.

They talk for a while, about Sam, about Steve’s nightmares, about how the times have changed. Dr. Day leads most of the conversation, which Steve appreciates. He glosses over a lot—lies a little. He feels like he and Dr. Day would be at least pleasant acquaintances, if it weren’t for, well, why they were actually speaking to each other in the first place.

"I'm afraid we're starting to run out of time now, Steve," she says, spinning her pen between her fingers. "I just want to ask how your search is going."

Steve hesitates. She asks this at the end of each session. Apparently Sam told her about everything.

Steve isn't sure what to say.

"It's about the same," he says because it's true.

 

Sam is only an inch or so shorter than Steve. Maybe he’s a little taller. He tends to lean back a little when he’s talking to people, so it’s hard to get a good estimate. He’s got a narrow, pointed jaw and laughs like he’s laughing both with and at Steve.

He shakes his hand firmly, smiling like he knows the punchline to a secret joke. His eyes are dark and shine with something that sets part of Steve’s mind ablaze. Not arousal (though Sam’s not unattractive by any means—he’s really good looking actually), more like seeing footage of the lighting of the Olympic torch: excitement for the moment where all the best (not that Steve thinks he’s the best), all these strangers with one goal in mind, meet.

 

He walks towards the bus station, allowing himself to linger in front of the bookstore. Stark—he can’t call him Tony and he can’t think about him without getting a bit of a headache—has been in a lot of headlines lately. A new biography about his life and sexual exploits has surfaced and there’s a window display. The cover catches the sunlight, reflecting off the photo of Stark’s sunglasses.

He ducks inside to read a few pages in the local bookstore and ends up, standing in a corner of the shop having to press a hand over his mouth to stop from laughing. He had suspicions about “André Ferro” before (that name), but he’s pretty sure all doubts vanish at the line: “Geraldine—whose lovely, firm breasts are accentuated by her flawless golden skin—said that she nearly fainted upon seeing Stark’s “member” for the first time. “I didn’t even know what to do with it!” she said, pressing an elegant hand to her chest. “I say to Tony, ‘I can’t suck that! I’ll suffocate!’” But she did, in the end, and wound up learning how to deep throat that very night.”

He buys a copy, because if he doesn’t buy a copy of Stark’s self-starring erotica, who will?

He ends up sitting at the back of the bus, crying from suppressed laughter by the time he’s gotten through the first three pages. A woman glances over at him and catches his eye, smiling a little, and he whispers an apology. She shakes her head, grinning.

Antoinette leaned forward over the balcony, her hair cascading over her face and shielding her gaze from the park so far below. Stark apparently had taken hold of her ankles and proceeded to thrust into her, hard and fast. According to pedestrians who happened to be in the vicinity of the apartment, Antoinette’s screams of ecstasy could be heard all the way across Central Park.

He almost misses his stop, he’s laughing so hard. He’s not even through the first chapter. He’s not even past Tony’s high school years. He’s fairly certain this book could be the next great comedic masterpieces.

Sam agrees when Steve shows it to him and they spend an enjoyable couple hours, preparing dinner and reading aloud to one another, choking on laughter and trying not to chop off their fingers while they’re stumbling around giggling.

Then Sam pulls a bottle of Jameson out of a cabinet and grins. "I can get you drunk," he says, nodding furiously. "I know I can get you drunk."

It's probably vanity or something like that. Pride. Something. Steve isn't too concerned because it’s good whiskey and Sam has a DVD of some new documentary about the Howling Commandos. They’re going to play a drinking game. A shot for each historical inaccuracy. And it’s from the History Channel, Sam points out, so they’re basically guaranteed to try and whitewash the whole deal.

Steve smiles and agrees.

He accepts the challenge because... well, first of all he's going to win and second he needs to not think about Bucky for ten seconds because he’s combed the file that Natasha gave him over and over—had nightmares about its contents—without finding any clue of where Bucky would have gone now. (Finding Bucky trumps pretty much everything, but since Sam is involved he can’t go off half-cocked with his shield on his back and a gut feeling.) But third... he just kind of likes watching things about himself, seeing himself through the eyes of others. It's so strange the idea that people look at him and he is—

"I'm pretty sure that mustache should count."

"Nah, he had a mustache like that."

"Jesus. You've got to be joking."

Steve smiles. "Not at all."

Sam makes a noise of disgust and sits forward in a way that speaks of poor balance. He's pretty drunk from the first segment where the documentary makers tried to insist he and Bucky were both the ultimate white All-American Boys. He looks at Steve now, dark eyes a little glassy, his round lips suddenly pressed into a straight line.

"Are you okay?" he asks. There's a crease between his eyebrows and the alcohol is cracking open all the emotions that run just below the surface of the words.

"Yeah."

Sam nods slowly, his head flopping back against the sofa, and he’s asleep within the hour. He hums a little in his sleep—tuneless and soft—and Steve finds himself grinning. Slowly, he stretches out Sam’s legs across the couch cushions and takes some of the pillows from the hall closet to make sure there’s no way he can lie on his back while sleeping before creeping back to his own room.

 

“Do you have anywhere to stay tonight?”

“I... I don’t think so.”

“Come on.”

 

Sam’s home is the first actual house Steve’s ever lived in. His parent’s first home in America was a tiny, one bedroom apartment at the top floor of a narrow, decrepit building that sagged toward the street. On the ground level was a non-kosher butcher’s; on the second floor was huge family from Poland; on the third floor was a pair of homosexuals who performed at one of the underground clubs; and in the attic he lived with his parents and a gas oven that threatened to blow up any day.

They lived there until he was eight, when the butcher finally died from heart failure, and they moved into his second home: the big, ugly brick building that was somehow always downwind from the smoke the streamed from the collection of factories nearby. Three weeks after they moved in, his father received a blow to the head at the factory where he worked and, by the time the week was out, he had thrown himself from the fire escape. Even so, he lived in that apartment until his mother died.

The best thing about the brick apartment was that Bucky lived on the floor below.

His third home is the tiny apartment he and Bucky shared right up until the war. A kitchen and a bedroom that was entirely furnished for the first year with a single mattress and the sofa he and Bucky took from his mom’s old things (covered with fading roses, reeking like the ghosts of old cigarette smoke that made Steve cough whenever he lay down on it). Four plaster walls (dented, stained)—a splintered floor. Home.

By the time Bucky was drafted (he lied to Steve about this; the file from Natasha says so. It hurts a lot.) there were four plates, some chipped mugs that always got used for coffee even though they both preferred tea (they never made any in that apartment, because Bucky’s tea was too weak for Steve and Steve’s tea was so strong it made Bucky gag), a drawer full of stolen silverware, a rusted out samovar and a collection of glassware that Steve could never really remember the origins of. Along with any objects of actual purpose, there was the clutter that Steve and Bucky both seemed to amass within a week of being in any one place.

There are all the hotels he stayed in while touring—too nice for him to really comprehend (culture shock)—and the tents while fighting.

There’s his apartment—paid for in full by SHIELD—for the past several years that he slowly filled with objects and books and crumpled receipts; with clutter. It’s now full of bullet holes and blood stains. He stayed there for a week after everything and then he and Sam tossed everything he had into boxes as quickly as possible: clothes and books and dishes and trash. The boxes are in Sam’s garage.

It’s strange to not live in New York. It’s been strange for the past few years.

And that’s where it begins.

 

He dreams about a picture he saw once when he was younger of a beach in southern France—garishly colorized with bright blue waves and acidic green leaves and magenta flowers; shadows too dark that reveal the poor quality of the original black and white photograph.

He dreams about tiny shards of glass and metal, carving into his skin as they fly past, colder than anything in the world—the heat of an explosion—the scent of singed hair.

He dreams of his first train ride; Bucky sitting across from him, beaming. The train moves unsteadily at first, grinding into motion loudly and sluggishly. Bucky has pushed open the window so they can hear every last noise. Smoke seeps in and Steve starts coughing, his lungs already seizing from nervous energy. The sun is hot through the glass, but the air that settles from the open window is icy. Bucky slaps his shoulder and his teeth are dark from the blood that’s dripping down from his nose. The nail has been pulled off his little finger and it’s bleeding onto the concrete, soaking in, sliding through the pores like a tongue against tongue—

He gets up and starts the coffee maker. The sun is starting to creep above the horizon. There are dark clouds hanging over any remaining stars. Rain.

Sam will be awake in half an hour.

Steve's phone, which seems to have become glued to his side over time, vibrates in his pajama pocket.

[Unknown Number]:
I'm coming over. -N

 

She arrives at five in the morning, her red hair pulled back in a ponytail and her face largely obscured by a pair of chunky glasses. Her pink lips, which often make her look almost like a teenager, are a little chapped. She's wearing a kind of oversized polo shirt and a pair of faded jeans. He shuts the door behind her as she moves quickly toward the kitchen, her back unnaturally straight.

"I found Barnes," she says once he's poured her a cup of coffee. Steve’s pulse catches for a moment. His heart feels like it’s risen to the base of his throat and his lungs seem suddenly too big for his ribcage. Nerves. He’s not sure where they’re coming from, but he’s got them all the same. "Well, I heard a rumor. It could be nothing. I just figured—"

"Where is he?” Steve cuts in because his heart feels like it's going to burst from his chest. His blood seems to feel too hot in his veins and his hands tremble as he hands her the mug. His thoughts seem to be stuck on a loop: She found Bucky. She found Bucky.

He can hear movement upstairs, Sam getting dressed for his morning run. Steve feels a strange tug of guilt but he's not sure what from.

"New Orleans," she says, examining his expression carefully. "By the river, I assume. I think he's trying to get a boat."

Steve is out of the room the moment the words are spoken, rushing upstairs. He passes Sam in the hallway ("Who’s downstairs?" he asks), but Steve moves past him, grabbing a dufflebag and beginning to stuff it with clothes. He's not been to the south since he was on tour and even then he'd only been to Birmingham, Atlanta and Little Rock; it had been hot then, early spring and sweat pooling at the small of his back, so he can only imagine what it will be like in Louisiana in the middle of July.

He still packs a sweater though, mostly because he can't stand the idea of traveling anywhere without one.

"What's going on?" Sam asks, standing in the doorway. He turns at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. "Hey Natasha."

"Sam," she says, jaw tensed. Steve pulls open one of the boxes of clothes from his old apartment and starts pulling out shirts.

"Steve, is someone coming?" Sam asks and his tone is firm.

Sam is coming with him, Steve remembers. He’s allied himself along with Steve and, thus, if there are any remaining Hydra agents around, Sam is in the line of fire.

"Bucky is in New Orleans," Steve says, because he trusts Sam to see everything underneath the words.

"He was in New Orleans," Natasha corrects and Steve looks up at her, a pair of socks in his hands. He's suddenly hyper-focused, able to feel every tiny stitch with his fingertips. "He was there in the French Quarter about a week ago. He's probably gone by now.”

"He might not be," Steve finds himself saying, more aware of the clothes he's dumping in the dufflebag than he is of the words coming out of his own mouth. "It's worth a shot."

“Do we know anything more specific about his location than ‘the French Quarter’?” Sam asks.

“Not really,” Natasha says, her expression pinched, “which is why I thought it would be a better idea to keep an eye on him for now and not do something stupid—Steve, this is directed at you, you know.”

“How much do you know, Natasha?” he asks, a little more harshly than he means to.

The corner of her mouth quirks upward in a half-smile. “He went to see a specialist about getting some repairs done, or so I’ve heard. Guess his arm’s kind of busted, but that was a week ago—”

Steve tosses the bottle of codeine from his bedside table into the bag and zips it shut. "I can't wait on this one. I have to find Bucky." He looks at Sam, because he knows that Sam sees Steve's face when he's thinking about—

Sam nods and heads back to his room. Natasha doesn't say anything more, but when Sam and Steve head out to the car, she climbs easily into the backseat.

"I can't leave you alone," she says to Sam, who's driving, "with just this dumbass for company."

 

The car doesn't have air conditioning because it's a loan from one of Sam's cousins who owes him a favor. The inside reeks of old cigarettes—a smell that still makes Steve cough even though he doesn't have asthma anymore—and the upholstery is weirdly crusty. The engine rattles when Sam turns the key in the ignition, but according to Sam's cousin "it just does that—don't worry too much about it."

So they drive with the windows down and it's loud enough that Steve doesn't feel like he needs to talk and it's good because he's not sure what to say anyway. His heart feels like it's overfull, about to burst with something that he isn't sure he wants to feel. His ears feel too cold. His stomach is aching from the coffee he drank earlier and the lack of anything else.

He can't drive while he's still on codeine.

The sun seems to have come to a rest, just a little ways above the horizon and the sky is full of color. The air that comes in through the windows is heavy and damp. It smells like a storm, but it's so hot that Steve's worried that rain is just going to turn Washington into a sauna.

Fences and trees move past in flashes that still somehow seem too slow because his chest is going to burst because Bucky.

But it's not going to be the Bucky he remembers. It's not going to be the Bucky that curled up behind him during the winter when Steve could hardly sleep from coughing. It's not going to be the Bucky that fucked up during his bar miztvah and swore in the middle of reading. It's not going to be the Bucky that kicked Jeff Miller in the head.

The day Bucky kicked Jeff Miller in the head was one of the most significant days in Steve's childhood. It was October and Steve (who was already visibly small for his age, already not allowed to run during breaks for fear of him dying of an asthma attack and already known for having a constant cough and terrible eyesight) had caught his third cold of the month and was coughing and wheezing during a spelling test, where Jeff Miller, who was big and German and a goy, sat directly behind Steve and whispered, as he had done every other day that year. "Yid." "Mick."

Although Steve first saw Bucky at services—once every other week because Steve's mother had to work on Saturdays and his father certainly wasn't going to take him—but they don't meet until that day in second grade. Bucky sat at the back of classrooms and blew raspberries when teachers spoke. He was stubbornly left-handed and would switch the way he held pens the moment the teacher's back was turned. He was notoriously girl crazy, always setting his sights too high on girls like Mary Catherine O'Brian or Gertrude Wallace—blonde, goyishe girls.

They had only spoken a few times before, but that day, in the middle of the spelling test, Jeff Miller's whispers became too much when he says the dreaded k-word and Steve knocked over his desk, launching himself at where Jeff sat. It didn't matter very much. Steve was on the floor in seconds and Jeff, who weighed twice as much as him, knelt on his chest and broke Steve’s nose for the first time in either of their lives. Ms. Everett screamed and tried to pull them apart and then Bucky appeared from the back of class, his yarmulke already half off and kicked Jeff Miller in the head.

Bucky got hauled to the principal's office and Steve was made to sit back down and finish his test--bloody nose and all—and he failed it.

But Bucky came back that day during break and when they filed in, he was sitting at Jeff's desk, eyes narrowed as though he was daring Jeff to do something about it. Bucky—who was only a little taller than Steve was but a good deal stockier; whose parents made him wear a yarmulke and a little silver necklace with a Mogen David; who had once thrown an apple core at the principal, a thin-faced Anglo-Saxon, while he was giving a speech Steve had been unable to follow about union workers—sat there, slouched and scowling, and watched Jeff pass him, rolling his eyes at the necessary whispered threat of "you're gonna get it, Barnes."

And Steve sat down in front of him, his cheeks burning because he didn't want to have to thank Bucky for being a fucking decent human being, and Bucky leaned forward and said, "My mom can fix your nose for you. If you want to come over to my house for a bit, I mean."

"Yeah, thank—"

Cellophane flowers of yellow and green towering—

Steve jumps and there's a moment where it feels like the sun is blindingly bright. He blinks, turning towards his left where Sam is playing with the radio, lips pursed.

"You okay, Cap?" he asks, his brow creasing as he looks at Steve's face. Steve drops his gaze to the hand brake, not wanting to see how Sam's expression changes from there.

"Yeah, I'm fine," he says and his throat feels too thick, like he's just swallowed ice cream.

Natasha leans forward and slaps Sam's hands away from the dials. "Not this song. Captain Kirk ruined it for me."

Sam laughs and Steve feels, as usual, like he's stuck in a bubble, watching the action take place around him.

She settles on some station that's playing, unsurprisingly, some song that he doesn't recognize. It has too much yelling for him and, honestly, it just sounds like noise to him.

He can't help being an old man.

 

"I have to pee," Natasha says somewhere in West Virginia. It's afternoon (traffic was slow around Washington and Sam got lost along some backwoods road Natasha told him to turn down in Maryland.) and the air hasn't cooled down yet. Actually, it is hotter. Sweat had pooled around Sam's hairline. No one's spoken in at least an hour.

There’s no wind outside. The trees stand still beyond the car, water trickling between their roots from the little streams that run along the forest floor.

The air feels almost suffocating it’s so hot.

"We're not stopping," Steve says a little too softly, because they still above a quarter of a tank of gas and it's already afternoon and they're still in West Virginia, so they're not going to stop. His breath feels too hot on his lips. He feels crushed, like even the air is pressing in on him.

"Yeah, I need to stretch my legs," Sam says. "We can take a break at the next gas station. Get some food."

"Mmm, gas station sandwiches," Natasha says, lounging across the backseat. "My favorite."

"We can't stop," Steve cuts in, because he must have spoken too quietly before. "We're not even in Tennessee yet."

Sam laughs a little and it feels like a bad scrape—stinging and painful in an unquantifiable way. There’s no blood, so it can’t be that bad. "Man, I need to get out of this car, okay? It'll only take a couple minutes—"

"We're not stopping!"

The words come out louder than he means them to and there's a pause where the only sound is the radio: “She’ll take a tumble on you—roll you like you were dice.” It feels like an age. Steve's ears burn from embarrassment and his whole person is suddenly on edge with the need to not be in the car. The dashboard seems much closer to his knees than it did before. His seatbelt digs into his sternum. Every part of his body is screaming to push open the door and smash, shoulder-first, into the pavement.

"We have to," Sam says and Steve feels like he’s just been shaken awake from a deep sleep. Sam doesn't sound like he's trying to appease Steve or like he's thinking very much about the words he's saying. He is—Steve knows, because Sam is a thoughtful person and he doesn't speak without careful consideration—but he's trying to ease the situation. "I don't want to run out of gas."

It's not really the reason, but Steve is so embarrassed that he doesn't argue. "Yeah, I could use a bit of a walk."

He can see Natasha in his mirror, watching him with careful eyes, and he purposely looks away.

To her credit, she doesn't say any of the things he knows she could and when they get to the gas station, she simply hops out of the car and walks slowly away from the car. For a moment, he wonders if she's giving him the cold shoulder, but then she stops and looks over her shoulder. "Do either of you boys need anything?"

"Coke," Sam says, unlocking the gas tank.

"One coke." She turns to Steve, her gaze even as always. "Anything for you, Steve?"

"I'm okay. Thank you."

She walks off and Steve is left awkwardly by the car, not wanting to get in Sam's way at the pump, but not wanting to follow Natasha either. Eventually, he just turns towards Sam, but doesn't walk around the front to join him. "I can pay for the gas."

"Oh, was there supposed to be some option involving you not paying for gas? Because I don't want to think about that."

Steve laughs and passes Sam his credit card. Sam inserts it in the machine. There's a moment, where there's just the sound of the radio playing over the loudspeaker and Sam pressing buttons on the machine (he remembers Steve's PIN better than Steve does). Eventually, he turns back, handing over Steve's card again, and asks, "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," Steve says and he can feel his heart jump a little, ready to make him flush all over again from embarrassment. "I'm sorry about getting upset earlier."

"You're fine," Sam says and Steve can almost hear Sam formulating what to say next. "You have to find him. I want to help with that."

Why? Steve almost asks, but he stops himself because he knows... Well, honestly, he knows he's not going to get an answer he understands. Sam is a good man—a good friend—but honestly, Steve can’t always fathom where his patience comes from. Even before the war, even before he had seen enough of the world to understand that he—Even before the war, Steve wouldn’t take shit. Hell, he had once punched Bucky for talking out of his ass.

Bucky used to say it was the Irish in him—that it was in his genes to fight anyone who pissed him off even slightly. Like his blood boiled in his veins instead of being pumped through. Like he sweats whiskey and was born to raise hell.

But Steve’s never wanted to raise hell. He’s just wanted to make the world safe.

Sam replaces the pump, climbs back into the car and pulls up to the front to wait for Natasha. The silence is thick between them, making Steve’s throat feel like it’s coated in milk. His heart feels like it’s curdled somehow. He watches Natasha as she moves toward the counter, her arms full of snacks. Steve can see the slight bulge on her back of her gun and averts his gaze.

She steps out, goes to the driver’s side and taps on Sam’s window. “Clint’s—Steve knows Clint. You don’t, Sam. Anyway, Clint’s in Tennessee if we want to stop there for tonight.”

They both look at Steve and he feels suddenly… He’s not sure what he feels. It’s not quite relaxation and it’s not as if he’s given up. It’s just—They’re looking at him carefully, but openly. Sam’s eyes betray a spark of stubbornness underneath—the kind that boils Steve’s blood. Natasha’s expression appears, at first, impassive, but Steve can see the small crease like a dimple between her brows that shows her concern. She wants to help him. They both do. And they’re ready to.

“That sounds like a good place to rest.”

Sam smiles at him, as though he wants to pat him on the back but he’s not positioned right for it at the moment, and then turns back to Natasha. “I’m guessing you know the way to this guy’s place, right? Do you want to drive?”

“Sure,” she says and Sam unbuckles his seatbelt. Before he climbs out of the car, he gives Steve a smile and a light punch in the shoulder.

“We won’t follow Natasha’s directions tomorrow,” Sam says and Natasha snaps, “I heard that!” back and yanks open his door for him.

 

It takes a couple hours. Natasha won’t let anyone’s hands on the radio and occasionally calls out, “Entertain me!” as she drives. It’s these sort of moments that make Steve deeply happy to be friends with her. Natasha can be silent and cold and frighteningly good at her job—but when she opens up, she becomes this: the sort of person who loudly demands food and has a new joke about how old he is each time he sees her.

He saw her Netflix list once. It was largely filled with sitcoms and a couple films he recognized as sort of cheap action movies.

He asked her if she liked to read once, when they were training together for a mission. She shook her head in response. “I don’t have time,” she said, sliding her gun back into its holster.

Sam falls asleep in the back and Steve finds himself watching his face in the mirror, the way the sunset lights up his dark, smooth skin. The way his soft lips sit a little open as he sighs. His hair sits close to his scalp in tiny black ringlets and some catch the light of the sunset, making it look like there’s a tiny red halo around him.

Steve looks at his own face in the mirror. The same as it’s ever been.

Clint’s apartment building is the kind of scared brick building Steve grew up in—stained black with dirt and smoke. The walls are covered in graffiti and old, water-logged posters and the windows are small, but the lights behind them glow like individual matches in the dark. Clint instructed Natasha on the phone to park in a multi-storey garage a few blocks away and then walk there. There’s a stereo propped in one of the open windows that’s playing something with a lot of bass and a deep, infectious rhythm.

It’s a bad area—Natasha warns them, pulling up the hood of her coat—they should avoid making eye contact if they can. Steve almost reminds her that he grew up in Brooklyn, but, honestly, he’s given up correcting people on their own ideas of who he is: the rich, Midwestern goy he was advertised as to sell war bonds. Even Natasha, who’s from Russia and thus (presumably) didn’t grow up with all sorts Captain America merchandise being shoved down her throat, has her own image of him.

But she’s not as bad as Stark or, God forbid, Phil Coulson, who might be the most annoying person he’s ever met—and maybe that’s why they get along so well.

He glances over at her as she punches a code into the lock, a few stray strands of hair falling forward across her face, her whole body tensed. He can almost feel how her muscles are itching to grab her gun. He wonders if she’s come to Clint’s place before. He wonders if Clint called Natasha or if she called him.

The main hallway is narrow, lit only by a flickering fluorescent bulb mounted in the ceiling. Its cover sits on the floor, cracked and covered in dead insects. The landlord’s office is closed and there’s a rusty padlock holding the door shut. The carpet is thin and matted with at least a decade’s worth of dirt and grime. Natasha doesn’t stop, but just heads straight down the hall and tugs open the door to the stairwell. Steve glances back at Sam, who’s looking around, a little uncomfortably, his shoulders slightly hunched.

They climb three flights of stairs, stepping around bits of trash like empty soda cans and ripped up envelopes and used condoms. There’s a single slipper sitting on one landing that’s been filled with cigarette butts. The whole space reeks in a way that Steve can’t quite pinpoint. Like the alley behind a butcher’s.

Natasha knocks at a door numbered 3-E. There’s a sound like a muffled explosion down the hall and the sound of shouting. Sam stiffens next to Steve, his hands balled into fists. Obnoxious, thumping music follows—it’s just a video game.

A chain rattles and the door opens.

Clint’s got a Band-Aid on his chin and Steve is pretty sure it’s from fucking up while shaving, because there are still some patches of stubble on his face. His hair is a little shorter than the last time Steve saw him. It looks like he’s cut it by using a pair of blunt scissors. He’s wearing a faded t-shirt which has the word Bioshock written on it. (Steve guesses this is the name of a place, because the image behind the shirt shows a yellow outline of a city. It could also be a movie. He needs to do a Wikipedia binge later. Clint seems like the type to have good wifi.)

“Hey Nat,” he says, grinning and stretching out his arms for a hug. She ducks beneath them and heads toward the back of the apartment.

“Hi Clint,” Steve says, offering his hand. Clint shakes it, his expression more serious, and glances at Sam. “This is Sam Wilson.”

“Great to meet you.” Clint shakes Sam’s hand and, as he leans forward, Steve notices he’s got a single one of those wrap-around headphones stuck in his ear. It’s a kind of pinkish beige and part of the plastic has cracked so it doesn’t curve properly around the ear is stuck instead with… electric tape. “Come in.”

He gestures for them to enter the apartment and locks the door behind them. It’s dark. A glowing nightlight on the left side of the space and the not-so-distant glow of a television (coming from, Steve assumes, the living room) show a door to their right side. “That’s the bathroom. Flush once for urine, twice for shit. And spray the air freshener when you’re done. I don’t need my apartment smelling like that. Down here—” He leads them into a single room that seems to be a combination living area and bedroom, “—is my office, living room and bedroom. You guys are welcome to the couch. It folds out. Over there—” he gestures to a sort of nook by the bathroom with a small refrigerator and a table with an electric grill on top of it, “—is my kitchen. Welcome to the palace of Clint.”

“Shut up,” says Natasha, who’s already sprawled across the sofa, phone in her hands. “Go order a pizza or something.”

“Jesus, you’re such an asshole,” Clint mutters, walking over to the cord-phone. “Which place? There’s a Pizza Hut a block from here.”

“Sure. We’re paying cash.”

“Of course we are.” He sighs and Steve notices in the dim light that Clint’s hair is graying a little at his hairline. It’s strange. Steve can’t remember if it was already like that when they met before.

Clint places the call and then wanders over to the refrigerator. “Beer?” he asks, holding up a glass bottle.

“Yes. Give it to me,” Natasha says before Steve can point out that none of them shouldn’t drink if they’re getting up early the next morning.

Sam glances over at him, eyebrows raised. Steve tries to convey his displeasure through his expression, but he must fuck it up somehow, because Sam smiles and says, “Yeah, one for me too.”

“I—” Steve starts, but then Clint has shoved a bottle into his hands. It’s ice cold.

He’s not supposed to drink while taking codeine. It’s bad for his liver or something. But the codeine barely does anything anyway because of the serum and he’s not had a beer in ages and it’s an actually good beer and so he doesn’t say anything when Clint cracks off the top (flourishing way more than necessary) with his bottle opener.

 

Clint’s refrigerator seems to be some bottomless pit of alcohol. They finish the good beer unfortunately quickly and everyone else moves onto something pale and just bad (Steve doesn’t drink any). Then Clint pulls out a bottle of vodka shortly after their pizzas arrive and Natasha claps excitedly and Steve feels a little left out. It’s stupid because he can’t get drunk and he knows he can’t get drunk, but at this point, he wishes he could. Something about the laziness in Sam’s smile, the way Clint’s hands clumsily brush the bottom of Natasha’s hair…

Sam stops after one shot and Steve doesn’t drink any of it, because he’s always hated the taste of vodka. Clint and Natasha pass the bottle between them and settle in on the couch to play video games, while Sam stretches out on the bed, eating a slice of pizza and staring at the ceiling. Steve lies down beside him, because even if alcohol doesn’t affect him anymore, beer is still essentially just liquid bread and besides that, he’s eaten too much too quickly. He feels lazy and full and… strangely content. He didn’t realize until this moment that Washington was making him stir-crazy, but now, lying next to Sam, he feels peaceful, like he’s just stepped over the threshold of his home after a long journey.

He looks over at Sam, who’s chewing slowly, his brow creased and his lips slightly pursed. He wants to reach out and touch him, but he’s worried. Worried that Sam will jump from the brush of his fingertips the way he jumped from the video game explosion in the hall, the one which sounded so real that even Steve felt as if his lungs were again filled with the smoke from burning flesh and hair.

“How’re you feeling?” he asks. He’s not sure why he asks. Sam is stronger, more resilient than most of the people Steve’s met in his life. But even monuments get worn with time.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m gonna suffocate, you know?” Sam says, softly. His gaze is distant and, if Steve is being fair, he did drink a lot in that first hour. He’s probably still at least tipsy. (If Steve is being unfair, Sam might be a bit of a lightweight, but Steve figures he can’t judge anyone for that now.)

(If Steve is being honest—which is different from fair—it’s not the liquor at all, but the video game explosion.)

“Why?” Steve asks. Sam blinks slowly, his skin blue in the light from the television. He seems to be gazing into a great distance—like he’s looking through the ceiling to the sky.

“I just think about… everything,” Sam says and Steve understands. He shifts himself closer to Sam so their arms are touching. There’s air conditioning in Clint’s apartment, but Steve still feels too warm, too sweaty from the humidity.

“Do you need to talk?” Steve asks, because he knows that weird ache, where it feels like his ribs will crack outward and rip open his chest. Like the entire world is trapped right behind his eyes and yet he’s reaching, dying to return.

Because if he returns, it will mean it really was real. That it wasn’t just some horrific nightmare. That he doesn’t dream of nothing.

“No,” Sam says softly and Steve turns towards the ceiling because he can’t bear to look at Sam any longer, though he doesn’t know why. He pushes his arm closer to Sam’s though and Sam pushes back a little.

The ceiling is almost invisible in the darkness, but Steve can see the faint lines of cracks in the plaster and the patchy shadows caused by damp and mold. The corners in his and Bucky’s apartment used to look like that—dark and moist from the leaking pipes above them. It made the whole room smell musty and thick and when it got really bad in the spring, with all the mold releasing spores, Steve could barely sleep for coughing.

And each spring, when it got too suffocating, Bucky would get up on a ladder (borrowed from their neighbor across the hall) and scrub the walls with bleach while Steve leaned out the tiny window and tried to breathe. Not that it helped much, considering New York air.

The walls were all white plaster—about the color of egg shells—and they were all cracked or dented or chipping away someplace or another. There were holes, Steve remembered, between the plaster and the baseboard that were generally filled with mice or spiders. And then there was the time a centipede got in and Steve screamed and Bucky nearly broke a rib laughing. The floors were wooden—unstained and unsanded. Bucky used to joke that he could never get girls to take off their shoes when he brought them home, for fear they would tear their stockings.

Steve got so many splinters walking across that floor. Some tiny, some large enough that Bucky would call them “branches” (though he meant “twigs”).

One time the plaster began cracking off above their bed (a thin, single mattress they shared in the winter) and Steve woke up that morning with his lips covered in white dust, feeling like his mouth was full of chalk. His eyes watered from being too dry and he blinked a few times, staring at the crack that had grown overnight from the leaking pipes above them. The plaster—too heavy to support itself, thanks to the water—started to crack off onto them.

And he woke with white dust in his eyelashes and the sound of a siren blaring outside. His nose was stinging with cold and the corners of the ceiling were getting dark again with moisture and mold; dark patches spreading outwards.

 

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah.”

 

When Steve wakes up the morning—light leaking through the gaps between the cardboard taped over Clint’s windows—the air conditioning has shut off and his arm is still pressed against Sam’s because they must’ve fallen asleep on the bed at some point in the night, their skin stuck together from sweat.

When he gets up, to interrogate Natasha about the time, he finds her curled up on the sofa beside Clint, a blanket over them and the bottle of vodka (now empty) lying on the floor by their feet. Her hair is spread out over her shoulders, red and silky in the warm light. In the pale morning light, their faces both seem gentle, serene—worry wrinkles made smooth with dawn.

He stays in the center of the room for a little while, just breathing in the heavy southern air. The shadows make the room seem cooler than it is. The white morning sun could almost be the light that reflects off of snow, that special light that already smells like wool scarves and woodsmoke.

A drop of sweat drips from the spot on his arm—like a round, pink burn—that was pressed against Sam’s. He shivers instinctively and Natasha gives a little sigh in her sleep, pressing closer to the arm Clint has wrapped around her shoulders. She looks young like this, content.

He takes one last deep breath—eyes shut, just listening to Sam’s slow, Natasha’s whispering sighs, Clint’s soft half-snore—and reaches for her shoulder.

He tries to be gentle when he wakes her.

 

He and Bucky rode their first train when Steve was fourteen and they were supposed to visit one of Bucky’s cousins in Boston. It was both of their first times out of New York and Bucky stood up at the window because he was too excited to sit down. He jumped up to open the little upper window (there’s a larger, lower part of the glass that’s sealed shut and hung with thin, faded curtains), desperate to hear every squeal of the wheels against the track as they started away from the city.

It felt like some sort of dream; sitting in the compartment, all dressed up in their best suits, a thermos filled with one of Bucky’s mom’s mysterious stews sitting on the table in front of him. It was only when the city started to move (not the city—it was them that were moving) and smoke began to pour through the open window that it felt at all real.

And even as his chest began to seize, Bucky slapped his shoulder and said, “Steve, look!”

And the businessman sitting across from them glared as he and Bucky exclaimed loudly and pressed their faces against the window, smears from their skin trailing across the glass.

“Holy shit,” Bucky whispered, his fingers tracing the outline of the buildings as they speed away, his face slack with awe. “Couldn’t you just die?”

“Yeah,” Steve said and his breath fogged up the glass for a moment. Slowly, he ran his fingertip through the moisture. It felt different, somehow, from when he drew in the steam that settled over the windows at his home. The world flashed by under his hands and it was so much bigger than anything he’d ever seen.

 

“A constellation of tears on your lashes—”

Sam has the windows down, hot wind moving his collar as he turns to Steve with a smile. Natasha’s asleep in the backseat, trying to get over all the booze from the night before, as well as (Steve assumes, despite himself) the fucking that he’s guessing went down between her and Clint. Her panties were lying on the floor beside the couch that morning and Clint lost all of his clothes from the night before sometime between when Steve fell asleep and when he woke up again.

A used condom—filthy and neatly knotted—was shoved into the empty bottle of vodka. It makes something stir in Steve’s stomach, but he’s not sure what. He’s had his suspicions about Natasha and Clint for a while. It’s just… strange, them fucking on the sofa, while Steve and Sam were sleeping in the bed, side by side, each dreaming about past lives.

“We’ll be there in an hour, I think,” Sam says, his voice a little steady. Steve knows Sam’s nervous about what they’ll find—about how Steve will react to what they find. What was it Sam said? He’s the kind you stop.

Steve takes a deep breath of thick, hot air. “Where should we park?”

Sam smiles, his upper lip folding back to expose his teeth. “You know, I’m really not sure. For some reason, I figured you’d look that up.”

Steve ducks his head and finds himself smiling despite himself. “Did you actually call the VA before we left?”

“Oh, you only just checking now, huh?” Sam laughs. “Yeah, I called them. Told them I got sick and would need a couple days.”

Steve snorts. “It’s definitely not you that’s sick.”

“Aw, hey.” Sam reaches over and ruffles Steve’s hair and Steve tilts his head back into Sam’s palm. He isn’t sure when it started—Sam touching his hair like this, his nails gently scratching Steve’s scalp, pushing his hair against the direction of growth so it stood up and then flattening it back down. It’s a familiar gesture. It reminds Steve of when he was little and sick, with his head on his mother’s lap as she petted him carefully and hummed half-songs to him. He can still remember—the cold sweat pooling between his shoulder blades—“You’re not sick either. You got that… super immune system or whatever.”

He leaves his hand on the back of Steve’s neck, tracing circles into the skin. Steve can feel sweat beginning to pool at the base of his spine and shrugs off Sam’s hand.

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

He looks away from the road at Sam, whose expression has become a little cold, and Steve knows he’s fucked up. “Yeah, well… If that’s what we’re talking about, I’m just as sick as you, Rogers.”

Rogers.

“Will you walk with me out on the wire?” the radio plays and Sam’s hands are a little too tight on the steering wheel. Steve thinks of the way his eyes were the night before, dark and glassy from liquor.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says. “That was a shitty thing of me to say.”

Sam’s shoulders relax a bit (when did they become hunched?), but his knuckles stay tight on the steering wheel. “It’s okay.”

“Have you been to New Orleans before?” Steve asks because… He’s not sure why. Sometimes he’s struck by how much he does or doesn’t know about Sam. They’ve not known each other long. He’s just—

He wishes Sam would put his hand back on his neck, but Sam hasn’t made any move to replace it.

“Nope. I’ve heard good things though. If—” He glances at Steve and Steve feels suddenly like he’s missing something, like there’s something happening just in the corner of his eye, like there’s something hidden in the crease between Sam’s brows. “If you want to stick around there a bit, after. It could be fun.”

“Maybe,” Steve says. Sam smiles at him and in the early afternoon sun, his skin shines a little and his smile is curved a little like a cat’s and he reminds Steve of a film he saw a long time ago, but he can’t remember the title. Maybe it wasn’t that long ago.

Sam’s hand reappears on the back of his neck, playing with the short, prickly hairs on the back of his neck.

Soon, they can see New Orleans up ahead of them—low and cramped in a way that’s very different from New York. It feels more like a European city to Steve, a little cluttered, a little unplanned. He can remember when he was younger, hearing about the big Mardi Gras celebrations down there—all the parades and music and parties. His father was a catholic, but more of the dour, Irish kind. The kind that had been so thoroughly punished before for his Mick face while walking out of church that the concept of religion combining with actually enjoyment seemed demented to him.

He could see the reflection off the river, cutting its path out of the city like a huge silver scythe. There are aluminum trailers in trailer parks and suburban homes lined up along the road, painted dark, rich colors. Steve isn’t sure what kind of route the GPS is taking them on. It seems very meandering—random, almost.

And then they’re in the city and at first it’s like most cities now—all modeled after the richest parts of New York (the places Steve’s never lived)—and then it’s old in a way that, again, Steve had only seen before in his time in France. Low overhangs jut out from old shops like the set of some serial Western he’d seen as a kid, but it’s all richer. All jewel tones and suddenly the traffic is much louder than it had been on the highway. Pedestrians are chatting to each other on sidewalks. Steve notices Natasha sit up in the backseat, her hair tousled.

“We’re here?” she says, voice still a little slurred.

“Yup,” Sam says, peering with interest out the windows. “We just gotta park.”

 

Heat radiates up through the concrete sidewalk and Steve thinks for a moment about the sweater in his bag. It just feels wrong, traveling without extra layers. It doesn’t make any sense, because now he’s stronger and he’s not in as much danger from the cold anymore, but he still—

A man bumps into his shoulder and Steve starts, looking back. There’s a flash of certainty in his mind that it’s Pierce, but the man is too short and too broad and too gray to be Pierce. His fingers twitch, but he’s not sure what he’s reaching for. His shield is in the trunk of Sam’s cousin’s car, too conspicuous to carry through the streets of the French Quarter.

“Eyes forward, Rogers,” Natasha mutters. Her hair shades most of her face and she’s small enough to pass as a moody teen, wandering around New Orleans with—

With who? Her two older male friends? Uncles? Yeah, a redhead with a black uncle. Jesus fucking Christ.

Natasha’s made him wear the heavy-framed glasses she loaned him before when they were hiding out from Hydra. He feels like a fucking joke—like Clark Kent disguising himself so no one will know he’s Superman, but no one looks twice at him. Maybe Supe isn’t wrong.

“These signs are just amazing,” Sam says, grinning like he’s trying to keep back laughter. Steve smiles at him, because, well, he’s right. The English-French mixture is amazing, making him cringe a little at the memory of bruised knuckles from rulers. A punishment for improperly conjugated verbs. “If I had an Instagram, I would be Instagramming all this.”

Sam says this a lot. Steve actually has an Instagram, but he hardly posts on there. He sort of wishes Sam had one. It’s nice—these websites: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. They’re like scrapbooks that you can look through and see someone at different points in their life. He wishes Sam had any sort of blog, but he’s not been able to find anything and there aren’t any photo albums around his house.

“You would wander around blowing our cover, you mean?” Natasha says, her voice low but still sharp. “Nice one.”

“Whatever.” Sam shrugs, not fussed, but he doesn’t continue, just looks around him still, smiling a little. “You know, Barnes doesn’t have the worst taste. Hiding out here wouldn’t be too hard. There’s more than enough distractions.”

He’s right. It’s hard for Steve to keep track of sign postings, let alone people in the crowd. Of course, it is summer, so there are more people than there are usually, Steve assumes. The buildings are all decorated with complex lattices and elaborate railings around balconies. It looks almost like there must be some holiday coming up, but there’s nothing. The buildings are just celebrating being there, still standing.

“It’s amazing how much of this place is still up,” Natasha says, as though she’s read his mind. “It gets hit by every storm that passes through the Gulf.”

They walk past a restaurant that has yellow doors that sit open. There’s a moment where the air is full of the scent of hot food and the sound of loud, excited conversations and Steve feels like his heart is heavy with borrowed time.

He wonders how old he’ll get, if he’ll die from old age. When he was younger, he had never understood how that could happen—how a person could get old enough that their body just… stopped. Everyone he knew worked and worked and they died from work and wear and—

His father’s skull cracked open against the concrete and that’s how he died. His face was always scarred when Steve knew him, but there was a photo of his parent’s wedding before the war when his skin was still smooth and clean shaven. But Steve only knew him after the gas, when he woke up in the night crying and coughing on the fluid in his lungs.

His father had learned to cook back in Ireland. His mother, Steve’s grandmother, died after giving birth to Steve’s uncle (whom he never met) and his father’s father looked to his son to take care of the house. He went to school for three years before he got a job on a local farm. A good, Catholic Irishman—still mostly a boy—who learned Latin by singing in the choir and could count on his two hands how many books he had read in his lifetime.

The Odyssey, the Douay-Rheims Bible, Journey to the Center of the Earth, A Study in Scarlet, The Island of Doctor Moreau, A Christmas Carol and A Princess of Mars.

He joined the army to become a legal citizen and came back, his right eye blind, his hearing half-gone and his face pitted and stretched with scars. His voice was gone.

Steve’s mother told him once that his father had had a beautiful tenor range when he was young, that she first heard his voice when he had a job washing dishes in a local pub for the summer. She had been sitting up in her room in town, windows pushed open. A Saturday. Too hot to go for a walk and her parents forbade her from doing anything else. She was reading by the window when she heard a voice outside on the street and looked down to see a gangly redhead below tossing out a basin of murky dishwater.

“‘What’s that you’re singing?’ I asked him,” she said, smiling a little from the memory. “And he looks up, grins, spreads out those long arms of his like he’s ready to start flyin’ and sings

“‘At the crossroads fair I'll be surely there
And I'll dress in my Sunday clothes
And I'll try sheep's eyes, and deludhering lies
On the heart of the nut-brown rose.
No pipe I'll smoke, no horse I'll yoke
Though with rust my plow turns brown
‘Til a smiling bride by my own fireside
Sits the star of the County Down.’

“And then an English soldier shouts at him down the street and he ducked inside quick as a wink, like a little imp.”

“Did he get the shit kicked outta him?”

She slapped him. “Watch your tongue!”

His cheek stung like a fresh burn. “Did he?”

No. The soldier didn’t care about some six-foot-two Irish boy who probably would’ve grown to be seven feet tall if he’d ever been properly fed, his hands cracked and seared red from boiling dishwater—orphaned by the time he was thirteen with that girly boy brother of his. (Steve’s uncle was informally disowned by the family before his parents left Ireland. His mother said he was strange—a little too loud for her liking—but Steve’s father loved him a great deal, but he had made some bad decisions and so he couldn’t continue to support him.)

Steve’s mother told him that when his father returned from the war, Steve—

“Here we are,” Natasha says. They’ve stopped in front of a building that reminds Steve of the brothel in Gone with the Wind. The windows are blocked by heavy curtains and old technology (he’s one to talk) sit behind the glass on dusty plinths. Laptops with two-inch thick bottoms and boom boxes. An old cellphone.

The windows in the front doors are painted over. Sam brushes his fingers over the surface and then rubs the tips against the pad of his thumb. “I think this is lead paint.”

“Whatever,” Natasha says and raps her knuckles against the glass. There’s a muffled sound like bells and then the door opens.

She’s tall, the woman who answers, with chin-length blond hair and arms to rival Stark. She glances at Steve and Sam before looking at Natasha and saying something in Russian. Natasha shrugs.

“You owe me a favor,” she says in English. The woman narrows her eyes and looks over Steve again.

“This is Captain America, yes?” she says, her accent not thick so much as weighted. “Who this?”

“Sam Wilson,” Natasha says, pointing to him. “Former pararescue.”

The woman raises an eyebrow. “What you want?” she asks, thin lips twisting in a half-scowl. She has broad shoulders like a boxer, covered by a crisply ironed blue button-up that’s tucked into her khaki capris. She has a cigarette tucked behind one ear, which she takes down and puts between her lips, pulling a lighter from her pocket.

“Barnes. You saw him. We can’t come in?” Natasha says, tilting her head to one side. It’s like watching two wild animals size each other up; neither woman has blinked since the conversation started, waiting for an attack.

The woman smirks and blows smoke through her nostrils with a small snort. “No, but you can sleep night upstairs if you want. Only ten dollars each.” The end of the cigarette glows as she takes a deep drag. “Who is ‘Barnes’?”

“You sent me a letter about seeing him here,” Natasha says and Steve can see that the tendons are starting to stick out in her neck. “Zimniy soldat.”

“Oh! Yes. He came, yes.”

“He was here?” Steve asks, before he can stop himself. His body feels suddenly very fragile, like his bones have become hollow.

They both look at him, Natasha harsh and the woman calculating. He can feel Sam’s hand on his left arm, warm and somehow soothing. The woman breathes out a puff of smoke. “Yes. He was here. I repair his arm. It was broke.”

“Where was he staying?” Natasha asks. Sam’s fingers dig into the muscle of Steve’s arm and he relaxes (when did he become tense?), but the woman just takes another drag.

“I don’t know. I think some attic. He kept talking about a broken roof, but I couldn’t follow all, because he’s a little…” She taps the side of her head and clicks her tongue. She gives Steve a small, sarcastic smile and what little patience he has snaps.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks, feeling his fingernails digging into his palms. Her smile widens. Sam’s grip on his arm tightens.

Natasha snaps something in Russian and takes a careful step forward, planting her feet firmly at shoulder width. The woman glances at her, smile fading. Her right hand twitches and she blinks slowly, her pale brown eyes growing cold.

“I don’t know where he is. By the river, I think. He asks about boats. He may be gone now. There is a man who looks for him.”

Natasha’s eyes flicker to Steve’s face exactly as he looks to her. “What kind of man?” Natasha asks.

“I don’t know,” the woman says, dragging on the cigarette and tapping ash by Steve’s shoe. “I never seen him. He came to town and ask the old boys about him.”

“Did any of them say anything?”

The woman laughs. “They are not as stupid as you, Natasha,” she says. Natasha grimaces.

“Do you have wifi?” Sam asks. Steve turns to look at him and notices that Sam’s grip has loosened again. His brow is creased though, his jaw tensed.

“Yeah, I have wifi,” she says, putting out her cigarette on the doorframe and dropping it to the ground. “Why?”

“So I don’t have to run up my dataplan using Google Maps to see which shops by the river have busted roofs,” Sam says, cocking his head in a way that Steve has quickly come to learn means he’s not in the mood for shit. “So what’s your password?”

 

The first night at Sam’s house, there was a thunderstorm and Steve found himself, like a kid, waking up from the sound. Boom. Awake. A few minutes, he was asleep again, then Boom. Awake.

He felt so disorientated that he started masturbating, only half-awake really, able to see the rain-streaked windows and his dreams still.

He never thinks about wet dreams when he’s awake. He knows that they don’t really mean anything, just the mind arranging the day apparently, but they’re also just… His dreams have never really made much sense anyway. Less something to be interpreted and more a random series of images with a single emotional punch.

He had a dream once about kissing the deli owner’s daughter. It didn’t mean as much as he thought it did at the time.

He woke up the next day, feeling uncomfortable and sweaty, his hand still down his shorts. He couldn’t remember what he’d dreamt about, just a memory of smeared glass and smoke and snow in his eyelashes.

Some soap and water—plus a dose of coffee once he got down to the kitchen—had him feeling normal again within a half hour.

 

It’s just a tiny attic, the space above the shop. The hole in the roof (which was large enough that Sam spotted it on Google Maps before he’d even zoomed in close enough to examine single blocks) lets in the majority of the light, but at one side there’s a tiny, narrow window. The ceilings are too low for standing. The beams are strung with debris caught in ancient spiderwebs. It’s probably not been cleaned in an age.

There’s a spot next the window where the dust seems to have been recently disturbed. There’s a pile of blankets—stolen, Steve guesses, from surrounding apartments. An empty carton of orange juice and a worn-out map sit nearby. There’s a shredded magazine there too: Playboy, he notes with some confusion, torn into inch-wide strips starting with the back cover. The front ten or so pages are still lying on the floor, abandoned.

All the footprints have treads from tennis shoes or just bare feet. There’s a grease stain in the floor beside the pile of blankets.

But the dust has clearly resettled since the disturbances, like fresh snow over a newly shoveled sidewalk.

“How long do you think he’s been gone?” Sam asks, picking up some of the magazine strips. His expression crumples as he bends over. “Jesus, this place stinks.”

Steve touches one of the blankets. Just shifting it releases more of the stench of sweat and semen and something like rust. The fabric feels greasy, but powdery, like plaster dust has fallen on it.

“Well… you can’t say we didn’t try.” There’s a hollow thunk sound as Natasha kicks over the carton.

Steve picks up the cover of the magazine. There’s a busty brunette on the cover, smiling and looking vaguely dazed. Her body is smooth and pale, free of freckles or scars or stretch marks. Her eyes are pale and half closed, her mouth open as she presses a hand over her groin. Her breasts are mostly exposed, only the nipples are covered in sparkly confetti. Her other hand is in her hair, gathering it up between her thin fingers like she’s inviting him to imagine doing the same.

The other pages are equally unhelpful. A brief examination of the orange carton reveals that it would’ve gone off three days earlier. Taking apart the pile of blankets only reveals some empty McDonald’s wrappers and some molding apple cores.

Nothing. There’s nothing here. Parts of him are shattering, crumbling like sand. There’s nothing there. No clues of where Bucky’s gone to. The only way of finding more information would be the woman at the tech shop, but Steve doubts she would be willing to help any more than she already had. Distantly, he can hear a child laughing and music playing down the street, but he can’t hear the melody. He picks up a polar fleece blanket, rubbing the material between his fingers.

He feels like he’s just been emptied—lighter, but not relieved, like he’s become hollow inside. Something in his mind tucks these feelings away, like an army bureaucrat. Complaint filed, to be dealt with at another time. Back to work.

“So… where do we go from here?” Sam asks. Steve looks up and sees that Sam is watching him carefully, concerned. Not worried for Steve’s reaction—Steve isn’t boiling up inside anymore and somehow he knows that Sam can see that—but of what toll seeing the space might take on him.

“I guess we get some food and find a place to spend the night,” Steve says, turning back to the synthetic fabric. It really does reek (not that that helps them at all). He wonders if the blankets weren’t stolen, but just taken from a dumpster. “And then… we go home, I guess.”

Sam is silent for a moment, looking at the orange juice carton.

“We can stay with Yelena,” Natasha says, hands on her hips and nudges the blankets with the toe of her sneaker. “She’s not bad, underneath all that.”

“Is that her name?” Sam says, smiling awkwardly, like he’s trying to ease the situation. “You didn’t introduce us properly before.”

They’re dancing around him again—careful of their idea that Steve could crack at any time, made delicate by Bucky’s return. They tiptoe through his emotional minefield as if… as if he would freak out, go nuts, explode.

Part of him feels angry about this, but a larger portion is aware of how unproductive his anger is. He needs to relax, prove that he’s alright.

He smiles at Sam, but he’s aware of how brittle his muscles feel. “I guess the trail’s gone completely cold.”

Sam gives him a small smile, still looking worried, but Natasha just raises one eyebrow.

“Is that meant to be some terrible pun? Like, because he’s the Winter Soldier?”

Sam laughs aloud—almost a gasp, like he’s shocked into laughing—and Steve finds himself smiling more easily now. He wrinkles his nose and narrows his eyes at Natasha.

“It wasn’t, but now you’ve ruined a great moment in Captain America history,” he says and she rolls her eyes, but she’s grinning too. “Imagine how clever that would’ve looked in a comic book.”

“Shut up, Rogers, and let’s get going. I’m starving.”

 

They eat fish at a restaurant a couple blocks away and Sam and Steve have beer and Natasha orders six Cosmos in quick succession, but she’s still shockingly coherent.

The restaurant is warm, the air damp and heavy with spices. The crowd is an odd mixture of vacationing retirees and tipsy twenty-somethings. The hostess leads them to a table by the window. The glass is smeared with fingerprints and there are people walking by outside—couples with their arms around each other’s waists, a boy with scraped knees and wire-rimmed glasses, a middle-aged woman walking a husky.

The fish has been blackened and it tastes bitter and rich on Steve’s tongue. The vegetables are in a stew, sweet with tomatoes.

They just keep ordering dishes, he and Natasha both cracking jokes about still having their SHIELD credit cards.

Sam drinks golden beer and there’s foam clinging to his moustache. The more he drinks, the more convoluted his jokes become.

Steve, in a moment of dizzying heat and humidity from the kitchen at the back of the restaurant—where is the air conditioning?—wipes the foam from Sam’s upper lip with his fingertips. The bubbles pop against his fingers and all he’s left with is a line of liquid across the side of his hand, dripping down and soaking into the band of his watch.

Sam and Natasha talk about buying a beach house in California—beautiful, sleek and modern, jutting right out of the mountains over the surf. The floor of the balcony will be glass, like an aquarium, but to watch people on the beach below.

Natasha lies across the booth, head propped against the window, half a French fry in her fingers as she looks up at the wood ceiling.

Sam tells Steve, as the sky becomes dark outside, about his niece, Jody. His eyes are wide, dark, shining. He’s got pictures of her on his phone—a little girl with dark brown skin and lots of curly hair styled into two French braids. Her hands are small and pudgy still, like a baby’s—her fingers short and her nails impossibly tiny and painted blue. Her palms are pale and the creases of her joints are dark. She’s sitting on the grass with a big border collie that seems to have decided that its first order of business is protecting the little girl in the princess crown with the Snow White costume and the Dalmatian socks.

She’ll be four soon, almost old enough to read.

He’s got pictures of his sister too—Sarah. She’s striking woman. Her skin is a little darker than Sam’s, but they’ve got the same way of smiling and the same eye-roll, from what Steve can tell. Her hair has been twisted in dozens of tiny, black braids and they’re all wound up into a large bun on the back of her head. She wears brightly colored blazers and dark-wash jeans, her arms strung with dozens of bracelets. She’s a lawyer and Sam has a photos from her graduation from law school, before Jody’s even been born, before he lost his wingman.

Sam leans his head against Steve’s shoulder. His breath smells of beer and fish and Steve manages, somehow, to hold back laughter at Sam’s tipsy slurring. He’s far more drunk than he was the night before; his mouth seems looser, his jaw almost slack. His eyes are glassy the way they were during their drinking game and he’s looking up past Steve through the window. It’s fully dark now. The stars can’t be seen, but the lights from the boats can, glowing a little through the smeared glass.

They leave the restaurant around eleven, huddled together as they walk back towards Yelena’s. Music plays from restaurants and clubs and people’s houses—none of the harmonies or the rhythms colliding properly. Natasha talks a little—about some soap opera she’s been watching and how bad it is—and Sam nods, but he’s drunker than she is and Steve’s not sure how much he’s actually listening.

Yelena lets them in the back door (painted red) and the house smells like stale pasta and old cigarette smoke and the floor is covered with brown and white linoleum. She leads them up the carpeted stairs and down a hallway lined with rough, wooden doors, all painted pale blue at some point in the past because the paint is flaking off. There’s something disorientating about the house. The whole building seems to have settled at something of an angle. She unlocks their door and hands Steve an old fashioned key. She’s wearing a pair of just out of fashion glasses that make her eyes look a little too close together.

“You leave before noon or you pay two days,” she says, lighting a cigarette with well-practiced ease. Her hands shake a little. “There’s food in the kitchen: downstairs, first right. Don’t eat the pizza. It’s mine.”

Steve nods and she walks away, blowing smoke behind her. Sam and Natasha have already collapsed on the (single) bed, so Steve curls up on the loveseat that’s sitting against one poorly-papered wall. There’s a small television on top of the bamboo cabinet, but it’s not plugged in and there’s nothing to hook it up to. A bare light bulb hangs from the ceiling, but there’s more than enough light from outside to see by.

The wallpaper is dark in places from mold and it’s peach colored, patterned with little drawings of… ducks? Some kind of bird. They’re not very good drawings.

There’s a table next to the window and a straight-backed wooden chair tucked in front of it. His sketchbook is back at Sam’s house in D.C., or he would sketch the room. He can’t sleep. His legs ache with the need for running, walking, anything and his arms feel like they’re going to fly off his body with the need to move.

He stands up and walks to the window, but below is just an empty alley. In the building across, some skinny artist-type (ha) is sitting on a window seat, torso half thrust out over the street to smoke a cigarette. They turn as a police siren blares a few blocks away and then scratch absently at a tattoo over one of their wiry arm muscles—Steve can’t quite make it out.

Natasha hums in her sleep and Steve looks at her and Sam, sprawled out over the faded bed clothes. Sam’s shoes are still on.

He steps out into the hallway and wanders down to the bathroom. There’s music playing downstairs. After he finishes up in the bathroom (the sink is stocked with a dozen different types of scented soaps and the medicine cabinet above is nothing but various brands of painkillers and bottles of rubbing alcohol), he heads towards the source of the sound.

There’s a light on in the kitchen—Steve can see pale yellow walls through the doorway and fake-wood fronted cabinets—and he enters, slowly.

The radio is on, some oldies station playing music past Steve’s time, and Yelena is sat at the table, smoking a cigarette with a laptop open in front of her. It’s dark green, heavy-looking. She doesn’t look up as he enters.

“You still cannot eat the pizza,” she says, typing. A line of ash is trembling at the end of her cigarette. Smoke streams from her nostrils.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Steve says, because he’s getting the strange feeling that he’s intruded on something. Yelena’s hair is tugged back in a tiny ponytail now, chunks of hair falling around her face. Her glasses make her look a little bit older, but she can’t be over twenty-five. “I just heard music and I thought I should check.”

She rolls her eyes and leans back in her chair at the long kitchen table, look at him carefully. “You can’t sleep? I thought you three are drunk.”

“I can’t get drunk,” he says, grimacing and opens the refrigerator just to have something to do. It’s stocked with sandwich meat and sliced cheeses and a couple boxes of take out.

She gives a small laugh. “And you don’t kill yourself?”

He smiles a little. “I get through the day somehow.”

“You smoke?”

“I had asthma when I was a kid. Never quite picked up the habit.”

“Injections?”

He smiles more broadly. “Only to get me like this.” He gestures to himself, a little awkwardly.

She nods and knocks the ash off her cigarette and onto the floor. “So does Captain America have a vice?”

Watching documentaries about himself, Steve thinks, but he just shrugs. “Not really.”

“How boring.” She returns to her typing.

Steve bites the inside of his lip, trying to hold back the question that needs to be asked. Finally, he parts his teeth and says, “Do you really not know anything else about the Winter Soldier?”

She looks at him, her expression guarded.

“I’m not accusing you of anything,” he says, trying to lean back against the kitchen counter, but he has to turn around to check where it is. When he turns around again, she’s lighting a fresh cigarette, her face mostly hidden in shadow. “It’s just… Anything you know could be a big help.”

She blows a stream of smoke from her lips (a little too large for her face). “I don’t know where he went. I was not finished repairing the arm.”

Steve sits down at the table, a chair down from her. “How had it been damaged?”

“A bullet lodged in the plating.”

What would that feel like? Would it feel like the pull of scar tissue? But it wouldn’t pull it would just… block the movement. He can’t imagine it, but his mind is still struggling to.

 

“How did he know to find you?”

She laughs. “All the old assassins come to New Orleans and anyone who’s anyone knows I am the woman who fixes the technology. It is what I do.”

“Who told him to come to you, though? Who told him to come to New Orleans?”

The end of her cigarette glows and Steve becomes aware of how much smoke is hanging in the air around her. Before everything, he wouldn’t have been able to stay in this house at all; he would’ve been wheezing on the curb, trying desperately to stop his lungs from seizing.

“I don’t think you understand who he is, the Winter Soldier; what they do with men like him.”

“Tell me then.”

She blows smoke out her nose and Steve accidentally inhales quite a lot of it. The smell still makes him cough. She seems to be hesitating, trying to work out the words to properly explain.

“They tear you up in your brain,” she says, her eyes carefully locked with his. A blood vessel has burst in her right eye, turning the outer corner yellow and red. “And then you kill and kill and kill. And you don’t know because your brain is broken. His brain is very broken. He can’t talk normally. He just… like, one word, two words, but it’s too little. I don’t know most of what he says.

“I don’t know how the Winter Soldier know to come to New Orleans but New Orleans is place of spies who they don’t want no more. But they want him. That’s why the man looks for him. That’s why he leaves, but I don’t know where he went.”

Steve feels like he just downed a shot of vodka, his stomach burning, his sinuses a little numb from breathing out some of alcohol. He swallows and lowers his gaze, trying to keep control of himself, but his eyes are burning. His nose is starting to run a little.

“Why do you look for him?” Yelena is watching him from behind her glasses, through the cloud of smoke. Her face is cold except for a small crease between her eyebrows. Concern.

“He was my best friend,” Steve says, because it’s the only explanation that makes even a little bit of sense. “I’ve gotta look for him.”

Her gaze flickers to his hands, which are resting on his forearms, and back to his face. The corners of her mouth twitch. “It must be difficult, to be friends with the Winter Soldier.”

Steve snorts, but his sinuses feel like they’re going to crack open. “Yeah, well…”

“Is this why you don’t sleep?”

He bites the inside of his lip. “I guess.”

“You want to know why I don’t sleep?” she asks, smiling distantly, like a cat that’s starting to doze off after being petted for a long time.

“Why?”

“They broke my brain,” she says and leans forward, parting her hair to reveal a small scar, clean and clinical. “I was trained for operation in Middle East,” she explains, sitting back up and smoothing her hair back into its ponytail, “and they think, ‘An assassin for a dangerous place. She must not sleep.’ So they put in my head a little chip to keep me awake. I sleep two hours each week, then the chip wakes me and I’m awake.”

She smiles, her eyes still trained on his face, and rolls up her sleeve without breaking eye contact. A scar stretches up her right arm—ugly, puckered and ragged, like the skin was ripped, not cut.

“This is what Natalya did, to wake me up. They filled my brain with fake thoughts, a fake life, and she hit me and hit me and hit me until I woke up. And then I ran away.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, for lack of anything better to say. He wipes his nose on the back of his hand. The skin beneath his eyes itches.

Your broken brain…

“I had a tiny little scar in my arm before,” she says, running her fingers over the taunt skin. “They put in my brain that it’s from where I cut myself while climbing out a broken window when I was a child. And Natalya grabs my wrist and says, ‘If you cut yourself climbing out a broken window, it’s not small, it’s like this—’ and she slices me open, twisting the knife to make it real.”

“Did you remember then?” Did he get the shit kicked outta him?

She smiles, tugging back down her sleeve. “Yeah. I remember then.”

Steve scoffs, leaning back in his chair and looking at the ugly trim, covered with shitty, unpalatable-looking pictures of baskets, overflowing with badly drawn fruits and vegetables. He turns back to her, to her blank smile and cold eyes. “Why’re you telling me this?”

Her smile broadens. “Compared to older projects, The Red Room—where me and Natalya are from—is considered very humane.” She takes a long, slow drag on her cigarette. “Be prepared to do a lot more to your friend the Winter Soldier. There’s a television in the living room, if that is how you wish to spend your night.”

Blowing out a cloud of smoke, she dismisses him.

 

“Penny for your thoughts?”

“You’re cute, Cap.”

 

It begins in a cold, moldy room in Brooklyn, where Bucky presses himself to Steve’s back, trying to block the icy draft that leaks through the window. They’ve piled up coats on top of their usual blankets, tugged on extra sweaters and pants, but the cold is unrelenting.

The floor of the apartment is strewn with old magazines and newspapers, smeared half-sketches and Bucky’s beat up work gloves. There’s a stack of dirty dishes on top of the stove and for some reason, Bucky’s left his boots by the entry to the kitchen. Steve’s puke-stained shirt sits, reeking, in the middle of the floor with his portfolio. Another failed interview and half a bottle of whiskey to wipe it from his mind combined with the fucking livers (they’re supposed to help him get iron, but Steve isn’t sure) and after the first bite, he was gagging, vomit dribbling down his chin.

Bucky cursed and threw his tie on the ground, shouting about those livers cost him two fucking dollars and how were they gonna get that money back, Steve? And Steve screamed back, tears mixing with the vomit that pooled over the plate with the livers like fucking red eels, that Bucky could go fuck himself because Steve paid for the God damn whiskey—and then he vomited again, because his stomach wasn’t going to let him just fucking die.

God damn it, Steve. God damn it, Steve. What the fuck were they—he had better eat those fucking livers, vomit or not, because Bucky wasn’t going to chip in another fucking penny to pay for that gross shit. Bucky was out of work and he’d already paid for two doctor’s appointments and the asthma cigarettes so—

And Steve yelled for Bucky to shut the fuck up because what the fuck did he know about anything? Steve hadn’t been fired for fucking some guy in the ass at the docks, for being a fucking degenerate, for—

Oh, what did Steve know? What did Steve know about anything? Just because Bucky was a tasty enough slice that all of fucking Brooklyn wanted him, Steve was going to use that against him? Not like Steve could’ve gotten half the little action he’d been part of without Bucky there to bring the girls like moths to a—

And Steve, still wild with whiskey and anger, swung blindly and busted a vein in Bucky’s nose.

They crawl into bed after Steve chokes down the liver (he should be used to it by now—why tonight?) and Bucky’s nose has finally stopped bleeding. They shuck off their day clothes despite the cold, Steve tossing his now filthy shirt on the floor beside his portfolio, and pull on long underwear dive under the covers.

Bucky’s breath is warm on Steve’s neck, smelling like whiskey and something kind of sour that Steve isn’t going to think about. They whisper apologies to each other every now and then, Bucky’s arms wrapped around Steve’s bony chest and Steve desperately trying to keep his breathing even, though his lungs are aching from cold air.

Bucky’s breath is hot and wet on his neck as he falls asleep, half-hard like Bucky always is when he falls asleep and Steve wishes that the feeling of Bucky’s dick, hot and stiff, didn’t make his cheeks burn and his ribs feel too small for his lungs and his heart.

Bucky’s a queer, yeah, and more than a bit of boozehound and a skirt-chaser, but Steve wasn’t.

So he doesn’t move.

 

Natasha leaves them when they pass through Tennessee, kissing each of them on the cheek and sliding out from the backseat. She walks confidently through the dark to Clint’s wreck of an apartment building, her back straight, her hands tucked in her pockets.

 

It begins when Sam unlocks the door to his house around one in the morning and Steve carries in their bags and they just sit, unspoken dissatisfaction weighing their mouths shut, on the sofa. Steve’s chest aches and his head feels much too heavy for his neck. He leans against Sam, who runs his fingers through the soft, stubbly hairs on the back of Steve’s neck, and closes his eyes. He’ll cry when he’s awake enough and alone enough.

“I’m here,” Sam whispers and Steve’s worried his heart might break from disappointment and—

“Thank you,” he whispers back and buries his face into Sam’s shoulder.

They’ll talk in the morning.